Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt (1938)

8/9/2019 Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt (1938)

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02/02/2015 Leon Trotsky: Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt (1938)

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Leon Trotsky

Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt

(January 1938)

Written: January 15, 1938.First Published: The New International, Vol.4 No.4, April 1938, pp.103-106.Translated: By The New International.Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters.Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2003. Permission is granted tocopy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free DocumentationLicense.

A “People’s Front” of Denouncers

The campaign around Kronstadt is being carried on with undiminished vigor incertain circles. One would think that the Kronstadt revolt occurred not seventeen years ago, but only yesterday. Participating in the campaign with equal zeal andunder one and the same slogan are Anarchists, Russian Mensheviks, left SocialDemocrats of the London Bureau, individual blunderers, Miliukov’s paper, and,on occasion, the big capitalist press. A “People’s Front” of its own kind!

Only yesterday I happened across the following lines in a Mexican weekly which is both reactionary Catholic and “democratic”: “Trotsky ordered theshooting of 1,500 (?) Kronstadt sailors, these purest of the pure. His policy when

in power differed in no way from the present policy of Stalin.” As is known, theleft Anarchists draw the same conclusion. When for the first time in the press I

briefly answered the questions of Wendelin Thomas, member of the New York Commission of Inquiry, the Russian Mensheviks’ paper immediately came to thedefense of the Kronstadt sailors and ... of Wendelin Thomas. Miliukov’s papercame forward in the same spirit. The Anarchists attacked me with still greater

vigor. All these authorities claim that my answer was completely worthless. Thisunanimity is all the more remarkable since the Anarchists defend, in the symbolof Kronstadt, genuine anti-state communism; the Mensheviks, at the time of theKronstadt uprising, stood openly for the restoration of capitalism; and Miliukov

stands for capitalism even now.

How can the Kronstadt uprising cause such heartburn to Anarchists,Mensheviks, and “liberal” counter-revolutionists, all at the same time? Theanswer is simple: all these groupings are interested in compromising the only

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Social and Political Groupings in Kronstadt

A revolution is “made” directly by a minority. The success of a revolution ispossible, however, only where this minority finds more or less support, or at leastfriendly neutrality, on the part of the majority. The shift in different stages of therevolution, like the transition from revolution to counterrevolution, is directly determined by changing political relations between the minority and the majority,

between the vanguard and the class.

Among the Kronstadt sailors there were three political layers: the proletarianrevolutionists, some with a serious past and training; the intermediate majority,mainly peasant in origin; and finally, the reactionaries, sons of kulaks,shopkeepers, and priests. In czarist times, order on battleships and in the fortresscould be maintained only so long as the officers, acting through the reactionary sections of the petty officers and sailors, subjected the broad intermediate layer totheir influence or terror, thus isolating the revolutionists, mainly the machinists,the gunners, and the electricians, i.e., predominantly the city workers.

The course of the uprising on the battleship Potemkin in 1905 was basedentirely on the relations among these three layers, i.e., on the struggle betweenproletarian and petty-bourgeois reactionary extremes for influence upon the morenumerous middle peasant layer. Whoever has not understood this problem,

which runs through the whole revolutionary movement in the fleet, had best besilent about the problems of the Russian revolution in general. For it was entirely,and to a great degree still is, a struggle between the proletariat and the

bourgeoisie for influence upon the peasantry. During the Soviet period the bourgeoisie has appeared principally in the guise of kulaks (i.e., the top stratum of

the petty bourgeoisie), the “socialist” intelligentsia, and now in the form of the“Communist” bureaucracy. Such is the basic mechanism of the revolution in all itsstages. In the fleet it assumed a more centralized, and therefore more dramaticexpression.

The political composition of the Kronstadt Soviet reflected the composition of the garrison and the crews. The leadership of the soviets as early as the summerof 1917 belonged to the Bolshevik Party, which rested on the better sections of thesailors and included in its ranks many revolutionists from the undergroundmovement who had been liberated from the hard-labor prisons. But I seem torecall that even in the days of the October insurrection the Bolsheviks constitutedless than one-half of the Kronstadt Soviet. The majority consisted of SRs and

Anarchists. There were no Mensheviks at all in Kronstadt. The Menshevik Party hated Kronstadt. The official SRs, incidentally, had no better attitude toward it.The Kronstadt SRs quickly went over into opposition to Kerensky and formed oneof the shock brigades of the so-called “left” SRs. They based themselves on thepeasant part of the fleet and of the shore garrison. As for the Anarchists, they

were the most motley group. Among them were real revolutionists, like Zhuk andZhelezniakov, but these were the elements most closely linked to the Bolsheviks.

Most of the Kronstadt “Anarchists” represented the city petty bourgeoisie andstood upon a lower revolutionary level than the SRs. The president of the soviet was a non-party man, “sympathetic to the Anarchists,” and in essence a peacefulpetty clerk who had been formerly subservient to the czarist authorities and wasnow subservient ... to the revolution. The complete absence of Mensheviks, the


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“left” character of the SRs, and the Anarchist hue of the petty bourgeois were dueto the sharpness of the revolutionary struggle in the fleet and the dominatinginfluence of the proletarian sections of the sailors.

Changes During the Years of Civil War

This social and political characterization of Kronstadt which, if desired, could besubstantiated and illustrated by many facts and documents, is already sufficientto illuminate the upheavals which occurred in Kronstadt during the years of thecivil war and as a result of which its physiognomy changed beyond recognition.Precisely about this important aspect of the question, the belated accusers say notone word, partly out of ignorance, partly out of malevolence.

Yes, Kronstadt wrote a heroic page in the history of the revolution. But the civil war began a systematic depopulation of Kronstadt and of the whole Baltic fleet.

As early as the days of the October uprising, detachments of Kronstadt sailors were being sent to help Moscow. Other detachments were then sent to the Don, tothe Ukraine, to requisition bread and organize the local power. It seemed at firstas if Kronstadt were inexhaustible. From different fronts I sent dozens of telegrams about the mobilization of new “reliable” detachments from among thePetersburg workers and the Baltic sailors. But beginning as early as 1918, and inany case not later than 1919, the fronts began to complain that the new contingents of “Kronstadters” were unsatisfactory, exacting, undisciplined,unreliable in battle, and doing more harm than good. After the liquidation of

Yudenich (in the winter of 1919), the Baltic fleet and the Kronstadt garrison weredenuded of all revolutionary forces. All the elements among them that were of any use at all were thrown against Denikin in the south. If in 1917-18 the Kronstadtsailor stood considerably higher than the average level of the Red Army andformed the framework of its first detachments as well as the framework of theSoviet regime in many districts, those sailors who remained in “peaceful”Kronstadt until the beginning of 1921, not fitting in on any of the fronts of the civil

war, stood by this time on a level considerably lower, in general, than the averagelevel of the Red Army, and included a great percentage of completely demoralizedelements, wearing showy bell-bottom pants and sporty haircuts.

Demoralization based on hunger and speculation had in general greatly increased by the end of the civil war. The so-called “sack-carriers” (petty speculators) had become a social blight, threatening to stifle the revolution.Precisely in Kronstadt where the garrison did nothing and had everything itneeded, the demoralization assumed particularly great dimensions. Whenconditions became very critical in hungry Petrograd the Political Bureau morethan once discussed the possibility of securing an “internal loan” from Kronstadt,

where a quantity of old provisions still remained. But delegates of the Petrograd workers answered: “You will get nothing from them by kindness. They speculate

in cloth, coal, and bread. At present in Kronstadt every kind of riffraff has raisedits head.” That was the real situation. It was not like the sugar-sweet idealizationsafter the event.

It must further be added that former sailors from Latvia and Estonia who


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feared they would be sent to the front and were preparing to cross into their new bourgeois fatherlands, Latvia and Estonia, had joined the Baltic fleet as“volunteers.” These elements were in essence hostile to the Soviet authority anddisplayed this hostility fully in the days of the Kronstadt uprising ... Besides thesethere were many thousands of Latvian workers, mainly former farm laborers, whoshowed unexampled heroism on all fronts of the civil war. We must not,therefore, tar the Latvian workers and the “Kronstadters” with the same brush.

We must recognize social and political differences.

The Social Roots of the Uprising

The problem of a serious student consists in defining, on the basis of theobjective circumstances, the social and political character of the Kronstadt mutiny and its place in the development of the revolution. Without this, “criticism” isreduced to sentimental lamentation of the pacifist kind in the spirit of AlexanderBerkman, Emma Goldman, and their latest imitators. These gentlefolk do nothave the slightest understanding of the criteria and methods of scientificresearch. They quote the proclamations of the insurgents like pious preachersquoting Holy Scriptures. They complain, moreover, that I do not take intoconsideration the “documents,” i.e., the gospel of Makhno and the other apostles.To take documents “into consideration” does not mean to take them at their face

value. Marx has said that it is impossible to judge either parties or peoples by what they say about themselves. The characteristics of a party are determinedconsiderably more by its social composition, its past, its relation to different

classes and strata, than by its oral and written declarations, especially during acritical moment of civil war. If, for example, we began to take as pure gold theinnumerable proclamations of Negrin, Companys, Garcia Oliver, and Company,

we would have to recognize these gentlemen as fervent friends of socialism. But inreality they are its perfidious enemies.

In 1917-18 the revolutionary workers led the peasant masses, not only of thefleet but of the entire country. The peasants seized and divided the land mostoften under the leadership of the soldiers and sailors arriving in their homedistricts. Requisitions of bread had only begun and were mainly from the

landlords and kulaks at that. The peasants reconciled themselves to requisitionsas a temporary evil. But the civil war dragged on for three years. The city gavepractically nothing to the village and took almost everything from it, chiefly forthe needs of war. The peasants approved of the “Bolsheviks” but becameincreasingly hostile to the “Communists.” If in the preceding period the workershad led the peasants forward, the peasants now dragged the workers back. Only

because of this change in mood could the Whites partially attract the peasants,and even the half-peasants-half-workers, of the Urals to their side. This mood,i.e., hostility to the city, nourished the movement of Makhno, who seized andlooted trains marked for the factories, the plants, and the Red Army, tore up

railroad tracks, shot Communists, etc. Of course, Makhno called this the Anarchist struggle with the “state.” In reality, this was a struggle of the infuriatedpetty property owner against the proletarian dictatorship. A similar movementarose in a number of other districts, especially in Tambovsky, under the banner of “Social Revolutionaries.” Finally, in different parts of the country so-called


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“Green” peasant detachments were active. They did not want to recognize eitherthe Reds or the Whites and shunned the city parties. The “Greens” sometimes metthe Whites and received severe blows from them, but they did not, of course, getany mercy from the Reds. Just as the petty bourgeoisie is ground economically

between the millstones of big capital and the proletariat, so the peasant partisandetachments were pulverized between the Red Army and the White.

Only an entirely superficial person can see in Makhno’s bands or in theKronstadt revolt a struggle between the abstract principles of Anarchism and“state socialism.” Actually these movements were convulsions of the peasant petty

bourgeoisie which desired, of course, to liberate itself from capital but which atthe same time did not consent to subordinate itself to the dictatorship of theproletariat. The petty bourgeoisie does not know concretely what it wants, and by

virtue of its position cannot know. That is why it so readily covered the confusionof its demands and hopes, now with the Anarchist banner, now with the populist,now simply with the “Green.” Counterposing itself to the proletariat, it tried,flying all these banners, to turn the wheel of the revolution backwards.

The Counter-revolutionary Character of the Kronstadt Mutiny

There were, of course, no impassable bulkheads dividing the different social andpolitical layers of Kronstadt. There were still at Kronstadt a certain number of qualified workers and technicians to take care of the machinery. But even they

were identified by a method of negative selection as politically unreliable and of

little use for the civil war. Some “leaders” of the uprising came from among theseelements. However, this completely natural and inevitable circumstance, to whichsome accusers triumphantly point, does not change by one iota the anti-proletarian character of the revolt. Unless we are to deceive ourselves withpretentious slogans, false labels, etc., we shall see that the Kronstadt uprising wasnothing but an armed reaction of the petty bourgeoisie against the hardships of social revolution and the severity of the proletarian dictatorship.

That was exactly the significance of the Kronstadt slogan, “Soviets withoutCommunists,” which was immediately seized upon, not only by the SRs but by the

bourgeois liberals as well. As a rather far-sighted representative of capital,Professor Miliukov understood that to free the soviets from the leadership of theBolsheviks would have meant within a short time to demolish the sovietsthemselves. The experience of the Russian soviets during the period of Menshevik and SR domination and, even more clearly, the experience of the German and

Austrian soviets under the domination of the Social Democrats, proved this.Social Revolutionary-Anarchist soviets could serve only as a bridge from theproletarian dictatorship to capitalist restoration. They could play no other role,regardless of the “ideas” of their participants. The Kronstadt uprising thus had acounter-revolutionary character.

From the class point of view, which – without offense to the honorable eclectics– remains the basic criterion not only for politics but for history, it is extremely important to contrast the behavior of Kronstadt to that of Petrograd in thosecritical days. The whole leading stratum of the workers had also been drawn out


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of Petrograd. Hunger and cold reigned in the deserted capital, perhaps even morefiercely than in Moscow. A heroic and tragic period! All were hungry and irritable.

All were dissatisfied. In the factories there was dull discontent. Undergroundorganizers sent by the SRs and the White officers tried to link the military uprising with the movement of the discontented workers.

The Kronstadt paper wrote about barricades in Petrograd, about thousands being killed. The press of the whole world proclaimed the same thing. Actually theprecise opposite occurred. The Kronstadt uprising did not attract the Petrograd

workers. It repelled them. The stratification proceeded along class lines. The workers immediately felt that the Kronstadt mutineers stood on the opposite sideof the barricades – and they supported the Soviet power. The political isolation of Kronstadt was the cause of its internal uncertainty and its military defeat.

The NEP and the Kronstadt Uprising

V ictor Serge, who, it would seem, is trying to manufacture a sort of synthesis of anarchism, POUMism, and Marxism, has intervened very unfortunately in thepolemic about Kronstadt. In his opinion, the introduction of the NEP one yearearlier could have averted the Kronstadt uprising. Let us admit that. But advicelike this is very easy to give after the event. It is true, as Victor Serge remembers,that I had proposed the transition to the NEP as early as 1920. But I was not at allsure in advance of its success. It was no secret to me that the remedy could proveto be more dangerous than the malady itself. When I met opposition from the

leaders of the party, I did not appeal to the ranks, in order to avoid mobilizing thepetty bourgeoisie against the workers. The experience of the ensuing twelvemonths was required to convince the party of the need for the new course. But theremarkable thing is that it was precisely the Anarchists all over the world wholooked upon the NEP as ... a betrayal of communism. But now the advocates of the Anarchists denounce us for not having introduced the NEP a year earlier.

In 1921 Lenin more than once openly acknowledged that the party’s obstinatedefense of the methods of Military Communism had become a great mistake. Butdoes this change matters? Whatever the immediate or remote causes of the

Kronstadt rebellion, it was in its very essence a mortal danger to the dictatorshipof the proletariat. Simply because it had been guilty of a political error, should theproletarian revolution really have committed suicide to punish itself?

Or perhaps it would have been sufficient to inform the Kronstadt sailors of theNEP decrees to pacify them? Illusion! The insurgents did not have a consciousprogram and they could not have had one because of the very nature of the petty

bourgeoisie. They themselves did not clearly understand that what their fathersand brothers needed first of all was free trade. They were discontented andconfused but they saw no way out. The more conscious, i.e., the rightist elements,

acting behind the scenes, wanted the restoration of the bourgeois regime. Butthey did not say so out loud. The “left” wing wanted the liquidation of discipline,“free soviets,” and better rations. The regime of the NEP could only gradually pacify the peasant, and, after him, the discontented sections of the army and thefleet. But for this time and experience were needed.


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Most puerile of all is the argument that there was no uprising, that the sailorshad made no threats, that they “only” seized the fortress and the battleships. It

would seem that the Bolsheviks marched with bared chests across the ice againstthe fortress only because of their evil characters, their inclination to provokeconflicts artificially, their hatred of the Kronstadt sailors, or their hatred of the

Anarchist doctrine (about which absolutely no one, we may say in passing, bothered in those days). Is this not childish prattle? Bound neither to time nor

place, the dilettante critics try (seventeen years later!) to suggest that everything would have ended in general satisfaction if only the revolution had left theinsurgent sailors alone. Unfortunately, the world counterrevolution would in nocase have left them alone. The logic of the struggle would have givenpredominance in the fortress to the extremists, that is, to the mostcounterrevolutionary elements. The need for supplies would have made thefortress directly dependent upon the foreign bourgeoisie and their agents, the

White emigres. All the necessary preparations toward this end were already beingmade. Under similar circumstances only people like the Spanish Anarchists orPOUMists would have waited passively, hoping for a happy outcome. The

Bolsheviks, fortunately, belonged to a different school. They considered it theirduty to extinguish the fire as soon as it started, thereby reducing to a minimumthe number of victims.

The “Kronstadters” without a Fortress

In essence, the venerable critics are opponents of the dictatorship of the

proletariat and by that token are opponents of the revolution. In this lies the whole secret. It is true that some of them recognize the revolution and thedictatorship – in words. But this does not help matters. They wish for a revolution

which will not lead to dictatorship or for a dictatorship which will get along without the use of force. Of course, this would be a very “pleasant” dictatorship. Itrequires, however, a few trifles: an equal and, moreover, an extremely high,development of the toiling masses. But in such conditions the dictatorship wouldin general be unnecessary. Some Anarchists, who are really liberal pedagogues,hope that in a hundred or a thousand years the toilers will have attained so high alevel of development that coercion will prove unnecessary. Naturally, if capitalism

could lead to such a development, there would be no reason for overthrowingcapitalism. There would be no need either for violent revolution or for thedictatorship which is an inevitable consequence of revolutionary victory.However, the decaying capitalism of our day leaves little room for humanitarian-pacifist illusions.

The working class, not to speak of the semiproletarian masses, is nothomogeneous, either socially or politically. The class struggle produces a

vanguard that absorbs the best elements of the class. A revolution is possible when the vanguard is able to lead the majority of the proletariat. But this does not

at all mean that the internal contradictions among the toilers disappear. At themoment of the highest peak of the revolution they are of course attenuated, butonly to appear later at a new stage in all their sharpness. Such is the course of therevolution as a whole. Such was the course of Kronstadt. When parlor pinks try tomark out a different route for the October Revolution, after the event, we can only


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respectfully ask them to show us exactly where and when their great principles were confirmed in practice, at least partially, at least in tendency? Where are thesigns that lead us to expect the triumph of these principles in the future? We shallof course never get an answer.

A revolution has its own laws. Long ago we formulated those “lessons of October” which have not only a Russian but an international significance. No oneelse has even tried to suggest any other “lessons.” The Spanish revolution isnegative confirmation of the “lessons of October.” And the severe critics are silentor equivocal. The Spanish government of the “People’s Front” stifles the socialistrevolution and shoots revolutionists. The Anarchists participate in thisgovernment, or, when they are driven out, continue to support the executioners.

And their foreign allies and lawyers occupy themselves meanwhile with a defense... of the Kronstadt mutiny against the harsh Bolsheviks. A shameful travesty!

The present disputes around Kronstadt revolve around the same class axis asthe Kronstadt uprising itself, in which the reactionary sections of the sailors tried

to overthrow the proletarian dictatorship. Conscious of their impotence on thearena of present-day revolutionary politics, the petty-bourgeois blunderers andeclectics try to use the old Kronstadt episode for the struggle against the FourthInternational, that is, against the party of the proletarian revolution. These latter-day “Kronstadters” will also be crushed – true, without the use of arms since,fortunately, they do not have a fortress.

January 15, 1938

Last updated on: 20.4.2007

Hue and Cry Over Kronstadt (1938)

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